Sunday January 21, 2018

Everywhere I walk, I’m surrounded by boring, meaningless garbage, interrupted only by the beauty of birds, leaves, and sunlight. My neighbors splay across the bumpers of their cars stupidities like “I’ll Cheer for Duke When They Play Al Qaeda.” Cargo boxes and credit form a world. Horrified bodies raise arms to the sky, their lives reduced to mere drudgery on account of machines. Capitalism, blind in its judgment of quality, turns our labor-power against us, chains us to programs and institutions; buildings, infrastructure; protocols; systems of assessment. We live aboard and help service a planetary totality every bit as oppressive as the Death Star. Such is the perspective achieved in Allan Sekula’s devastating portrait of the global economy, The Forgotten Space.

Relentless toil, interrupted only briefly: ’tis the fate of the global many under capitalism. Twenty-first century realism consists of stories of people coerced into building around themselves labyrinths they can never escape.